Compulsively Aimless

If you want to organize your adventures and discoveries three different ways: by geography, by person, and by experience.  Here are three on my bookshelf. 1.   The Oxford Book of Exploration, Selected by Robin Hanbury-Tenison (1993).   Excerpts of famous and obscure adventures divided into the seven continents with entries ordered chronologically.  Bought used at an impromptu book sale on the steps of townhouse in Adams Morgan.    2.  Dictionary of Discoveries, I.N. Langnas (1959).    Organized by explorer.  Starts with Luigi, Duke of Abruzzi, Italian mountain climber and participant in Italian Arctic expeditions and ends with Eugen Zintgraff, German explorer of Africa.   Bought used at The Bookshop in Chapel Hill, NC.                3.  The Rand McNally Almanac of Adventure: A Panorama of Danger and Daring, Richard Whittingham (1982).   An attempt to cove...

Vintage Books created a series of affordable paper back travel books--some of which have become modern travel classics.  I unintentionally started buying them because the travel topics interested me.  The series contains over 170 books.  Here's my collection: 1.  Iron & Silk, Mark Salzman (1986).  Before China was fully opened and before Peter Hessler wrote his insightful books on China, a young American martial arts student, Mark Salzman, went to live and travel in China.  The result is a series of sketches about his experience.  Salzman's experience is richer for his fluency in Mandarin. Bought used but can't remember where.  Contains a book stamp of the previous owner, Nell P. K. from Ormand Beach, Florida.   2.  Dazinger's Travels: Beyond Forbidden Frontiers, Nick Danzinger (1987).  In a fine tradition of English intrepid eccentric travelers, Danzinger creates his own epic trip He travels from Turkey to Beijing on f...

Proving truth is stranger than fiction, this is a short but fascinating list.  Two men who left their home countries for far off places and changed identities and found themselves in the middle of international intrigue (some of it of their own making).  1.  Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse, Hugh Trevor-Roper (1977).    Sir Edmund Backhouse was known as one of England's foremost Chinese experts having donated a large collection of Chinese books to the Bodleian library and authored a Chinese dictionary.  Trevor-Roper uncovered the bizarre truth that Backhouse was one of the most extraordinary liars, forgers and deceivers of the 20th Century.  His story reveals imaginary arms deals made up and reported by Backhouse back to England that resulted in England sending battleships to China.  He is also found to have made up books about the Chinese court where he claimed extensive familiarity with the Empress dowager. ...

I have a lot of books on roads, road trips and road adventures.  Trying to organize them into categories can be difficult.  There are cross country road trips, meandering road trips, and road races.  Then there are the purposes for which people travel roads---pilgrims set out to make a new life.  When I finished law school, the greatest freedom I could think of was to get in my car and drive across country.  Car + 26 year old, and lots of roads meant freedom.  That trip was part pilgrimage. I retraced a 1919 trip my maternal grandfather made at the same age.  I tried unsuccessfully to publish a book out of the adventure. This group is picked for some of the most adventurous road trips with a little history thrown in. 1.  The Wild Roads: The Story of Transcontinental Motoring , T.R. Nicholson (1969).   Stories of motoring firsts in the early age of the automobile.  Nicholson's expertise in early automobile adventures hit the sw...

I n addition to authors, there are also book series on traveling that have ended up on my shelves.  During the 1980s and 90s, Atlantic Monthly Press published a great collection of adventures simply called Traveler.   I've never been able to find a complete list of all the books but seems there about fifteen total.  Here are mine.  1.   Night Train to Turkestan:  Modern Adventures Along China's Ancient Silk Road , Stuart Stevens (1994).  Maybe one of the funniest, irreverent travel books I've ever read.  In an attempt to retrace the 1936 journey of two famous adventurers (Peter Flemming and Ella Maillart) from Beijing to the far western city of Kashgar, Stevens sets out with three American companions.  His traveling companions include Mark Salzman who wrote his own account of life in China ( Iron and Silk, to be mentioned in a later list).  They travel through a surreal landscape on crowded, crude buses and trains meeting one unusual...

This list is a surprise because it is unintentionally the longest.  I didn't intend to collect river books but I think rivers serve a special place for explorers, travelers and story tellers.  There's a defined purpose to start at the mouth of the river and move upstream to its source.    Rivers have served as the source of religion, mythology, cradles of civilization, and cultural inspiration.  For the Greeks, there was the River Styx, which divided the underworld from the world of the living.  Mark Twain used the flow of the Mississippi to tell the story of America in Huckleberry Finn .  Lewis and Clark followed rivers during much of the Voyage of Discovery.  Joseph Conrad used the river of the Congo for the path of Marlow to find Kurtz in Heart of Darkness .    Books about rivers have proved captivating for readers and publishers.  In making the list, I discovered at least two different series that had been published on ri...